Docker exploded onto the scene in 2013, and it's been causing excitement in IT circles ever since.

The application container technology provided by Docker promises to change the way that IT operations are carried out just as virtualization technology did a few years previously.

Here are answers to 13 of the most common questions related to this technology.

What are containers and why do you need them?

Containers are a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. This could be from a developer's laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production, and perhaps from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.

If you talk about software automation with developers and devops, there's a good chance that Chef and Puppet will come up in conversation. In the last 18 months or so another name has joined them: Ansible.

Named after a fictional communications device, Ansible is an open-source automation engine that automates software provisioning, configuration management and application deployment. The project was founded in 2013 and bought by Red Hat in 2015 for a sum believed to be in excess of $100 million.

Ansible is very similar to Chef and Puppet, yet its Ansible that everyone seems to be talking about. And a quick look at StackShare's list of Top 5 Most In-Demand Devops Tools shows Ansible in third place in terms of job openings listing the tool as a required skill, just behind GitHub and Docker. Red Hat itself is also keen to back up claims of Ansible's popularity: Jim Whitehurst, the company's CEO, said recently that Ansible is included in about a third of all Red Hat deals.

]]>http://www.cio.com/article/3197670/application-development/why-ansible-has-become-the-devops-darling.html
Software DevelopmentOpen SourceMobile is the new desktop, and that's good for enterprise appsTue, 09 May 2017 06:15:00 -0700Paul RubensPaul Rubens

Android surpassed Microsoft's Windows in March to become the most popular operating system on the internet, according to figures compiled by GlobalStats, the research arm of web analytics company StatCounter.

GlobalStats found that, worldwide, Android had a 37.93 percent internet usage market share, just ahead of Windows at 37.91 percent. "This is a milestone in technology history and the end of an era," said Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter's CEO. "It marks the end of Microsoft’s leadership worldwide of the OS market which it has held since the 1980s. It also represents a breakthrough for Android, which held just 2.4 percent of global internet usage share only five years ago."

Editor's note: This article was originally published in November, 2013. It was last updated in April 2017.

Take a look at the next desktop PC or laptop you come across. Odds are good it won't be running an open-source operating system. Microsoft's closed-source Windows has by far the highest share of the PC client operating system market, followed in a distant second by Apple's macOS. Linux and other wholly open source operating systems have only a tiny market share.

It's not hard to see why. Despite the advances made by distributions such as Ubuntu, desktop Linux is still miles behind Windows and macOS in terms of the look, the feel and the slickness that most office workers have come to expect. The vast majority of companies simply aren't prepared to make office workers use an open source OS — and most office workers aren't prepared to use them, either.

Changing your business processes to match your software sounds like a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. After all, business leaders are responsible for deciding how their company is run, and software is supposed to support that, helping the company run as efficiently as possible.

Yet this is exactly what is happening in 82 percent of enterprises, according to a survey by TrackVia, maker of a low-code software development platform. These companies report changing a part of their business operations or processes to match the way their software works.

Is allowing corporate software to dictate how a company is run an abrogation of management's duty to manage, or can it sometimes be the best way to manage a company?

]]>http://www.cio.com/article/3189142/application-development/why-you-should-sometimes-let-software-run-your-business.html
Software DevelopmentSoftwareOpen Source5 reasons developers love containersThu, 06 Apr 2017 06:06:00 -0700Paul RubensPaul RubensLinux containers have been around for almost a decade, but it was only with the release of Docker four years ago that large numbers of developers began to adopt the technology. Now it seems that containers are everywhere and their popularity continues to rise.

"AI is the new UI" may be a cliché now, but back in 2011 when Apple first released Siri the capability to control a mobile device by talking to it through an intelligent assistant was revolutionary. Granted, Siri wasn't as smart as HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey or Eddy, the shipboard computer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it made enough of an impact on consumer technology to spawn a stream of similar intelligent assistants.

Siri was soon followed by Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's Assistant. And these will likely be joined soon by many others, including Samsung's Bixby, which is based on technology Samsung acquired when it bought Viv, a company founded by the people behind Siri.

Talk about starting a business based on open source software and the conversation will inevitably shift to Red Hat. That's because the Linux vendor is a shining example of a company that's making money from an open source product. But how easy is it really to establish an open source startup that makes money? For every success story like Red Hat there are companies like Cyanogen that fail to thrive and projects that are abandoned.

]]>http://www.cio.com/article/3178621/open-source-tools/how-to-make-money-from-open-source-software.html
Open SourceStartupsWhat is the point of learning C?Tue, 14 Feb 2017 05:46:00 -0800Paul RubensPaul Rubens

Take a look at the TIOBE Programming Community Index — an indicator of the popularity of programming languages — and you'll see that Google's Go and, to a lesser extent, Dart and Perl are trending up. The venerable C, however, is a language whose popularity is plummeting, according to the index.

In a world where there is huge demand for mobile and web applications coded in higher-level languages that are easy to learn and debug and difficult to make mistakes in — at least compared to C — one might assume there’s no reason to bother with a low-level language that's going out of fashion.

Does this mean that C isn’t worth learning? The answer isn’t quite that simple.

]]>http://www.cio.com/article/3169540/application-development/what-is-the-point-of-learning-c.html
Software DevelopmentCareersSkills and TrainingLessons from the rise and fall of an open source projectWed, 08 Feb 2017 08:15:00 -0800Paul RubensPaul Rubens

Eight years ago, the CyanogenMod project exploded onto the mobile device software scene. The Android-based open source mobile operating system quickly caught the attention of developers, Android fans and investors, and attracted interest from tech giants including Microsoft and Google. But at the end of last year the project imploded spectacularly. Today the CyanogenMod project is no more, but the arc of its story offers fascinating insight into the world of open source software development.

The project started out innocently enough following the discovery, in 2008, of a way to root mobile phones running Google's Android operating system, allowing modified firmware to be installed on rooted devices. One such piece of firmware was created by a developer called Steve Kondik, whose online handle was Cyanogen — a colorless toxic gas made by oxidizing hydrogen cyanide. The modified firmware was known as CyanogenMod.

Slack exploded onto the scene three years ago, and since then just about everyone from industry giants like Facebook to small groups of open source developers have been getting in on the team collaboration software act.

Today the pace of collaboration software development and innovation is frenetic, and according to research by G2 Crowd, a peer-to-peer business review platform, the boom in corporate adoption shows no sign of slowing down in the near future. It found that more than half of all companies have already implemented team collaboration solutions of one kind or another, and 31 percent plan to adopt one in the next two years.

Adversity makes strange bedfellows, and in the case of VMware — a company that has made its fortune selling server virtualization software — that bedfellow is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the public cloud leviathan.

Let's rewind to the middle of October, when Mark Lohmeyer, a VMware cloud business unit vice president, announced that the company was forming a strategic partnership with AWS so that VMware's server virtualization and other software could be run in the AWS public cloud. The idea is that VMware customers using the company's software to run a private cloud in their own data centers will be able to expand into a similar VMware infrastructure run in AWS's public cloud, thereby forming a VMware-based hybrid cloud. The VMware software (called vCenter) used by company administrators to manage the private cloud will reach into the AWS cloud to manage the VMware software running there as well.

Picture this: Your company's network is facing a DDoS attack, but you have no idea who is responsible or what their motivation might be. Without this knowledge, you can't tell if they want money in exchange for stopping the attack or if the attack is a diversion to occupy your security team while your network is being penetrated and commercial secrets are stolen.

In the aftermath of a network breach it can also be incredibly useful to know some information about the likely attackers. That's because knowing who they were — or just where they were from — can help you carry out a more accurate damage assessment exercise. This knowledge can guide you where to look for signs of data compromise, and what other specifics (such as exploit kits or Trojans that may have been left behind) to search for.

Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) with the creation at the end of September of a new AI and Research Group. This newly formed group brings together Microsoft's research organization and more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI and is now the fourth major division in the company, on par with the Windows, Office and Cloud divisions.

The job of the AI and Research Group will be to work on four overarching initiatives:

Harnessing AI through agents such as Cortana, the company's digital personal assistant

Infusing AI into Skype, Office 365 and every other Microsoft application

Making cognitive capabilities such as vision and speech and machine analytics available to external developers

Using Azure to build a powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud to provide "AI as a Service”

Last month, BlackBerry announced that it was quitting the phone-making business, but the BlackBerry name will live on. That's because the company has entered into a licensing agreement with an Indonesian company that will manufacture, distribute and promote BlackBerry-branded devices running BlackBerry software.

The situation is similar at Nokia. The Finnish company left the feature phone business it used to dominate and instead is licensing its name and numerous patents to two companies — one Chinese and one Finnish — that will work together to produce Nokia-branded handsets.